Kosterlitz received a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1965 and 1969, respectively. He had a fellowship at the Istituto di Fisica Teorica in Turin, Italy, from 1969 to 1970 and was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham from 1970 to 1973. He spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1973 to 1974, before returning to Birmingham. He remained there until 1982 when he became a professor of physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

During Kosterlitz’s first stint at Birmingham in the early 1970s, he and Thouless became interested in phase transitions in two-dimensional materials. Phase transitions happen when matter changes from one type to another; for example, when water boils, it goes through a phase transition when it changes from liquid to gas. Physicists thought that two-dimensional materials would not have phase transitions, since any order that would arise would be wiped out by random thermal fluctuations. Phenomena like superfluidity and superconductivity could not happen without phase transitions. Kosterlitz and Thouless found a topological phase transition in which pairs of vortices form at cold temperatures and then disperse as the temperature increases. This change is known as the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition (or the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless [BKT] transition) and appears in many other areas of physics.